swimsense

This:

http://www.finisinc.com/equipment/electronics/swimsense.html




Kind of a cool device. At a high level, it relieves you of the burden of having to count laps, which can be kind of a drag after 30, 40 minutes plus. You can look at extra stuff like stroke count per length, and time per length.

First impression is that the hardware works but the software that lets you view your activity is still fairly beta. It confuses yards and meters frequently. If you swim in a 25m pool it will record your activity in meters and then display it in yards. Here is an example. Today I swam 2000m. (Lack of familiarity with the buttons meant I missed the first lap, so it recorded 1975m).



Note how it shows summaries in yards. And then on a goal I defined in meters, it put the number of yards I swam and labelled the unit as meters. Bah.

They seem pretty interested in improving the product. Hopefully this stuff gets sorted out soon.

Even as is, it looks like it will encourage me to swim more often and try more experiments in the pool since I'll be able to evaluate their impact clearly. Plus it will probably make me swim sets at different paces, etc. rather than just one long plod at a steady speed.

Will report later on the H20Friendly modified iPod shuffle I tried in the pool today as well.